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Amélie Nothomb

Biography

Amélie Nothomb photographed in 2009 by ΛΦΠ (Wikimedia Commons)

Amélie Nothomb was born in 1966. Her father was a Belgian ambassador and she joined a family notable for its writers and politicians. Because of her father’s occupation, much of Nothomb’s childhood was spent abroad, in places as diverse as Japan, China, Laos, Bangladesh, Burma and America. Experiences of Japan and childhood later informed the novel Métaphysique des tubes.

In 1972 Nothomb arrived in China from Japan at the age of five, and the family lived in the multinational diplomatic enclave of San Li Tun in Peking. Le Sabotage amoureux drew on experiences of this time, detailing alliances and conflicts between the area’s children when the notorious ‘Gang of Four’ ruled China. The sudden transition from a Japanese culture whose elevated sense of aesthetics demanded beauty in everything to a Peking saturated with ugliness during the Cultural Revolution has informed both the themes of Nothomb’s writing and her personal view of the world. She has claimed that a harsh binary division between the gorgeous and the grotesque along with nostalgia for a lost beauty was coded into her perceptions at this time.

In 1975 the family left China for New York. However, their stay in the West was brief as her father’s involvement with the United Nations led to a new post in Asia. In Bangladesh Nothomb experienced personal isolation and encountered extreme human misery. She had little in common with local children and forays into the street led her to see damaged and dead people lying abandoned. She has claimed since that this type of exposure prompted both a heightened sensitivity to social injustice and a desire to escape from such disturbing stimuli through reading. For example, in the leper house that their parents supported, she and her sister Juliette tried to effect a double insulation from the horrors around them by shutting themselves in the quiet room reserved for them and immersing themselves in literature.

Diplomatic postings to Laos (1980) and Burma (1982) followed Bangladesh. Lack of access to schools and established libraries meant that Nothomb’s formal education was sporadic. Her parents’ library furnished her with a wide range of books, which she read avidly. These included popular novels, ancient classics and canonical French texts by authors such as Diderot, Proust and Stendhal. She has identified these as key influences on her own writing, laying greater public claim to their literary kinship to that of contemporary Francophone writers. She was particularly fascinated by Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme, which became a distorting lens through which she tried to envision a Europe that was exotic in its remoteness from the isolated parts of Asia she inhabited. Perversely, when she returned to Europe it could not live up to the fantasies she had projected onto it, although she now reports feeling more comfortable living in both Brussels and Paris.

Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen Nothomb suffered from anorexia, a condition prompted in part by her desire to hold back puberty, a state that appeared to her as ‘une monstrosité physique’. Her weight at its lowest was 36 kilos and she suffered hair loss. Paradoxically, it was only after she lost the childhood body she felt was a ‘perfect’ fit for her, that, aged seventeen, she began to develop her voice as an author. She has also stated that she unconsciously took over this role from her admired sister Juliette, who had written previously, but had stopped when she also suffered anorexia.

Images of grotesque bodies figure largely in Nothomb’s writing and she has admitted freely that her depiction of the maturation of the female body is equivocal and disturbing. She has stated ‘je n’ai jamais regretté d’un quart de seconde d’être une femme’. Yet she also famously declared ‘Prétextat Tach, c’est moi’, thus identifying herself with the protagonist of Hygiène de l’assassin who strangles his cousin Leopoldine to prevent her becoming a woman. Nothomb however contests the drawing of easy parallels between the depiction of violence in texts and its real-life equivalent. She has argued that the excessive, almost comedic violence of parts of her novels offers a relief from the potentially unassimilable horror of real-life suffering, while leaving space to think through actual conflicts. Given her large teenage readership, this approach seems to resonate with a generation troubled increasingly by body dysmorphia. Nevertheless, some feminist critics have remained less convinced by her apologetics and have criticized her texts’ lack of explicit condemnation of the conflation of the womanly and the grotesque, which can also inform real acts of violence against women.

In 1984 Nothomb started a course in the philology of Romance languages at Brussels’ autonomous university. However she tended to feel alienated by the apparent conformism of Belgian society. She cites Nietzsche as a key influence at that time. In 1988 Nothomb returned to Japan to seek work as a translator. She fell in love and became engaged to a Japanese man, although ultimately did not marry him. Employment in a hierarchical Japanese company proved stressful, an experience that informed Stupeur et tremblements. She went back to Europe and started work in earnest on Hygiène de l’assassin.

Nothomb has written since her late teens. She has stressed frequently how important the act of writing is to her and claims to retain many unpublished manuscripts. Hygiène de l’assassin was her first published novel, issued in 1992 by Albin Michel.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s she has published prolifically. Her writing has been translated into up to 30 languages, with some texts also being adapted for film, theatre and opera. Her books feature regularly in French bestseller lists. Several have also gained literary prizes including the Grand Prix de l’Academie Française. In 2008 Nothomb was awarded the Grand Prix Jean Giono for her contribution to literature.

—: Kemp, Anna: ‘Amelie the Aesthete: Art and Politics in the World of Amelie Nothomb’ in Women's Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature ed. by Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013, pp. 237-50)